Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Abolitionist, Voting Rights Activist, Journalist
Fought for education for all, civil rights, and women’s rights, and published seven collections of poetry, essay collections, and several novels in the 1800s with a career that spanned over half a century.
Written by shift7, published here with permission.
In 1845, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a 20-year-old, free, black woman born in Baltimore, Maryland, published Forest Leaves; ten years before famed poet Walt Whitman published his now canonical Leaves of Grass. A book of poetry capturing the spirit of Frances’s experiences, hopes, and beliefs, Forest Leaves was one of seven poetry collections, in addition to essays and novels, which she published before the turn of the 20th century¹.
Frances, orphaned at a young age, was raised by her politically and civically engaged aunt and uncle, Henrietta and William Watkins. The head of the Academy for Negro Youth, William enrolled his niece in the school, and later, at 13, she gained regular access to a bookshop. By her late teens, Frances had her first poems published in abolitionist periodicals, including one run by Frederick Douglass², eventually earning her the reputation as the “Mother of African American Journalism.” Like her uncle, Frances became a teacher in Ohio (the first woman to teach at Union Seminary) and later in Pennsylvania. While in Pennsylvania, Frances lived at a station on the Underground Railroad and took an active role in the effort to help enslaved people travel to freedom. Her experiences influenced not only her poetry, but also her journalistic pursuits and activism³. When she was prohibited from returning to her home state of Maryland in 1854 because of new laws that could result in her being sold into slavery, Frances began traveling around the Northeast and Midwest giving anti-slavery speeches, in a mix of poetry and prose⁴.
At age 42, Frances appeared before the 11th National Women’s Rights Convention in New York; other speakers included Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott. At a time when the movement for women’s suffrage was deeply plagued by racism, Frances told the room, “I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. […] You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs⁵.”
Harper was also a leading activist on educational access, social reform, and civil rights for all. In 1896 she co-founded the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) with Mary Church Terrell, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, and several other leaders⁶. Frances lived to see the abolition of slavery, but also the insidious formation of Jim Crow in its wake. She died 53 years before the Civil Rights Act codified non-discrimination based on race and sex. While the works of her white male contemporaries like Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau are well known and well preserved, Forest Leaves was thought to be lost to history for more than 150 years, only to be recently discovered “hiding” in the archives at the Maryland Historical Society, where fans and scholars can visit it today.
Find out more about Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and her published work, novels, essays, and poetry collections including Forest Leaves (1845); Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854); Sketches of Southern Life (1872); Poems (1857); The Martyr of Alabama and Other Poems (1892); The Sparrow’s Fall and Other Poems (1894); and Atlanta Offering (1895).
You can visit Frances’s story in person too:
- Baltimore, Maryland (birthplace)
- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper House — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Frances’s home for the last 40 years of her life, now a National Park Service national historical landmark, not open to the public.)
- Maryland Historical Society — Baltimore, Maryland (Has a copy of Forest Leaves in its library, once considered lost to history for more than 150 years.)
- Former location of James Young Printer — Baltimore, Maryland (The publisher/printer of Forest Leaves.)
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